[Corpora-List] Google searches as linguistic evidence

[Ramesh Krishnamurthy]

Dear Vlado

The Cobuild dictionary (3rd ed 2001) gives research
as "N-UNCOUNT also N in pl",
i.e. it is uncountable (ie not used with a/an in singular form);
but is also used as a plural noun.

Bank of English evidence:

>Query is "researches/NOUN" [*Note from RK: to the extent that the 
>POS tagging is accurate...]
>Term 1 in your query has been selected as the node
>
>272 matching lines

>Corpus         Total Number of       Average Number per
>                Occurrences           Million Words
>
>brbooks              76                  1.8/million
>newsci               10                  1.3/million
>strathy              19                  1.2/million
>indy                 29                  1.0/million
>guard                30                  0.9/million
>usbooks              23                  0.7/million
>usacad                4                  0.6/million
>usephem               2                  0.6/million
>brmags               24                  0.5/million
>brspok                9                  0.4/million
>times                23                  0.4/million
>bbc                   8                  0.4/million
>econ                  5                  0.3/million
>oznews                8                  0.2/million
>brephem               1                  0.2/million
>wbe                   1                  0.1/million
>sunnow                0                  0.0/million
>usspok                0                  0.0/million
>npr                   0                  0.0/million
>usnews                0                  0.0/million

Of course, a lot of English texts on the Web are also written by 
non-expert English speakers,
which will affect the distributions...
I wonder if the proportions are the same for other languages?

Best
Ramesh

At 16:50 07/12/2006, you wrote:

>Yet Another Story:
>
>After showing to one of my students how to use Google to verify
>validity of some lexical and syntactic constructs, a couple weeks later I
>was presented with significant Internet evidence that "research" is a
>count noun and "in many researches" is a valid phrase.
>
>--Vlado

Ramesh Krishnamurthy

Lecturer in English Studies, School of Languages and Social Sciences, 
Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
[Room NX08, North Wing of Main Building] ; Tel: +44 (0)121-204-3812 ; 
Fax: +44 (0)121-204-3766
http://www.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr.jsp

Project Leader, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network): http://corpus.aston.ac.uk/ 
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